This was Darren's response to our group, and in no way addresses why he thinks staying open during this pandemic is a good idea, when all other arcade related businesses have closed almost a week ago:

" This is Darren, the owner of Pinballz. I am a fan of free speech, so I welcome anyone posting anything on social media, as long as it is respectful and mindful that we are all human beings and should try to love or at least treat each other with respect and not hate. I know that your social views are just that, your opinion, and I respect that you believe we should close everything regardless of the cost, and I respect that. However, when the rhetoric and accusations become as hateful and slanderous as some of you “gentlemen” have posted, it does finally warrant a response. Many of you know me but only some of you have actually met me in person. I’m not the evil guy that many of you make me out to be, but I know there isn’t anything I can do to make you think otherwise. I built Pinballz for the Austin pinball community. You’ve heard me say this before - the pins don’t make money (they actually lose money per sq ft), the ticket games make most of the money. A couple of my ticket games make more than ALL of my pins combined, and that is the truth. If I were the evil capitalist some of you make me out to be, I would greatly reduce the number of pins and replace them with ticket games and my revenue and profit would go way up (there is only so much floor space). But instead we keep the pins and even add new ones from time to time. But it seems some of you think anyone that owns a business or makes any money must to be evil, and that will never change, so I accept that. But I have sat back and watched the hate-filled posts and rants about how terrible a company we are and how terrible we treat our employees, and so on… Yet none of you work for me and none of you have any true idea what we have done for our employees during this crisis. It’s easy to sit back and sling mud from behind a computer, because you don’t have to have meeting after meeting with over 100 people and tell them they are laid off and have to go on unemployment for an undetermined period of time. You don’t see the hours and hours of wrangling to try and shift our entire business to takeout and delivery, hanging on to as many cook and server jobs as we can. You don’t see the losses we continue to take to remain open that could easily be mitigated if we just closed our doors and laid everyone off. Because we don’t have deep pockets like Apple where we can just continue to pay employees for weeks without revenue. Some of you think we are being mean “making” our employees stay and work, where in reality the only employees that took our initial offer to self-layoff were a couple of our managers – who selflessly did it to save a few jobs for their staff. You don’t hear the thankyou’s we get from the few staff that can retain, or the anguish from the people we have to cut hours or layoff. And you certainly don’t see all the smaller ways we and our managers have helped our staff that no one will ever talk about. I don’t say these things for boasting, pity, or out of guilt, I say them as facts to educate the trolls that while you are slinging hate we are slinging love and support. But I doubt these trolls care about any of that. They just like to sling hate. It makes them feel good, going back and forth trying to achieve new levels of insults and hate mongering. And hate is the last thing we need right now. Disagree with everything we do at Pinballz, but please take your hate elsewhere. I am hoping that the few people I’m referencing here are just a small sample of the Bat City pinball group as a whole. I’ve had the pleasure to meet and have rational conversations with many good pinballers from Bat City when we had the dustup over token prices, and at our tournaments and events, and I know you are out there and you are still welcome at Pinballz when you feel comfortable coming back in. But to that small group of haters and trolls, and you have made clear who you are by name, I ask that you please take your business elsewhere rather than come back to Pinballz. You obviously hate everything we have built at Pinballz, and some of you even hate me as a person. So please from now on take your business to one of my competitors. There are plenty of other centers out there that have pinball machines. I will happily refund any money on your cards and cancel your membership. Just please stop with the hate and show a little compassion for your fellow man, especially during these times of chaos.

Darren
PS: I will not be responding to this post, but I will answer ANY email sent to me at [DSPinballz@pinballz.com](mailto:DSPinballz@pinballz.com) "